Archive for May, 2007

Offline Marketing

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

During the course of developing a business plan and an integrated marketing strategy for online promotions it is essential to also include offline marketing methods depending to your specific location and demography. Offline promotions will boost up your online activity especially if you are targeting your local market.

Here are few offline marketing methods of advertising that you may consider to look on for promotion of your product and service. You never know when classified readers might be looking for a great business deal or even your simple phone call or a handshake can work wonders for you.

  • Ads on newspaper- It’s very inexpensive medium which has greater reach and reader base. You can choose cities as per publication for targeting your customers. You can use classified for appearing your ad constantly in a very reasonable cost.
    You are reaching a larger market, and your advertising efforts will stand out.!
  • Handing out flyers at local club, restaurants, phone booth, cyber cafe, with your business card with your URL on it could be effective methods of advertising.
  • Local Networking – Your local Chamber of Commerce, club meeting, trade shows, social gathering, seminars can create good opportunities for your business prospect through networking. You can exchange business card and capture contact and leads with the person you met during such networking and even you can close a sale on the spot especially in seminar and trade show.
  • Blimps, Banners, and Billboards- You can grab people attention by displaying your ad with attractive banner and billboard as such advertising capture the views of people and help in offline branding of your product as well.
  • Yellow Pages service businesses- Best tools if you are dealing with business such as hotel/restaurant, plumber, pesticide, electronics, local club, spa services, health club, lawn services, etc. benefit most from this form of advertising, easily traceable, a consumer know the type of service they need.
  • Direct mail- direct mail come in a variety of forms and are effective too (postcards, flyers, letters, e-mail newsletters, handbill). The beauty of such medium is that your message reaches each recipient in a personalized way, it could be a highly localized medium especially suited to a targeted geographic marketing.
  • Car Ad- Car ads through car cards generally a size of 22×21 inch interior card, car run your ad on the road, it endorse the brand with the owner of the car. Exposure can be from 5 seconds to 15 minutes and more on traffic signal point, it can achieve a high level of repetition of your ad to viewers.
  • Cable advertising- cable ads are highly localized and much affordable than TV, some local programs are much popular locally. The local cable stations will create your ad in a reasonable cost.
  • Radio Ad- Radio ads are mobile that follows the listener from your room to along drive, its very targeted to particular demography as it is easy to afford and easy listening. It’s a flexible medium; you can get an ad on the air promptly and change your ad message frequently.
  • One can’t underestimate the power of offline marketing even today on this internet-age so it is precise to have a good combination of both online marketing joining with your offline efforts to meet your business objective and consistent growth.

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    Marketing through Social Networking Sites

    Saturday, May 12th, 2007

    The beauty of social networking site is it enables users to connect with other business professional and similar business interest groups by extending their reach through contact base and user generated content. You can use specific social networking site as a relationship management tools for selling your product and services to a targeted group by influencing a specific group.
    Social networking involves different needs for people to connect with other like-minded individuals that can be your targeted customers.

    Myspace, Flickr, Facebook, Linkedin and Reddit and many more such sites are hanging out million of visitors and users through high enough interesting content and word of mouth through the user profile pages, here are few tips that can bring you good potential through social networking.

    SocialNetworking

  • Choose the social networking sites those which are prominent, well networked and that seems to be a good platform for marketing your product or services
  • Keep your page appealing and clean and concise
  • Identify the highly-targeted audience
  • Initiate communication with them but make sure that should be individual and meaningful
  • Approach them with an offer to becoming part of your network
  • Leave thoughtful and relevant comments on their pages
  • Try to be more approachable, soft, gentle, avoid crude and irrelevant comments
  • Add new useful content on your page and update it regularly
  • Use bulletin service to promote your product or service by giving lucrative offers to the specific networking sites members
  • Visitors reaching to a social networking sites through direct navigation, word of mouth and bookmarking sites so share your profile links to others, use bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, netvouz etc. Make sure that your content should be of high enough interest, quality, and value so that people can also linkbait it. Social networking sites need regular monitoring and networking hence it must be nurtured to make it worthwhile to develop business relationship with users through effective promotion.

    List of highly recommended social networking sites.

    1. Digg
    2. Del.icio.us
    3. MySpace
    4. Flickr
    5. Reddit
    6. Newsvine
    7. Youtube
    8. Technorati
    9. Wikipedia
    10. Feedburner
    11. Bebo
    12. StumbleUpon
    13. LinkedIn
    14. Squidoo
    15. Wikihow
    16. Shoutlife
    17. Frappr
    18. Furl
    19. Netscape
    20. Fark
    21. Shoutwire
    22. Facebook
    23. reddit
    24. Jotspot
    25. BlinkList
    26. Yahoo! 360
    27. Yahoo! Answers

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    Who are the Linux desktop users?

    Monday, May 7th, 2007

    This one is for the Penguin Lovers out there ;)
    penguin.png

    A typical Linux desktop user is a guy in his twenties who’s computer savvy but may very well not be an IT professional. Those are some of the conclusions you can draw from the just-released openSUSE survey results. The survey, published by OpenSUSE.org (PDF download), was run for almost three months, and more than 27,000 users participated in it.

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